When Love Had a Leg to Stand On : An Inquiry Into an Old-Fashioned Courtship Ritual

June Allyson did it. June Haver, too. Never June Havoc.

Gloria DeHaven says she did, but nobody remembers seeing her do it.

Gloria Swanson would have died first.

Rita Gam, a putative natural, came along too late.

Debbie Reynolds? Incontrovertibly. Anybody named Debbie is a lock. Or Judy, or Midge, but never Deborah, Judith or Margaret, as in Kerr, Anderson and Rutherford. Ann Rutherford, yes, but last names don’t count (unless it happens to be Ouspenskaya).

Cute girls did it, perky girls, wholesome girls. Evil girls--the “other women”--didn’t: Tarnished images are too hard won to be compromised on a frivolity.

Mature types--Greer Garson, Madeleine Carroll, Marjorie Main--would have looked silly.

Cues From the Silver Screen

Femmes fatales didn’t have to.

Yet an entire generation of young women, getting their cues from the Silver Screen, did it in slavish imitation, risking limb, if not life. A lot of them broke their heels. Some even broke their legs. None of them, as near as can be determined, ever broke a heart--ironic, since that was the object of the whole tsimmes. By its very nature, the exercise was totally lost on the target of seduction. Assuming he was tending to business, he couldn’t even see it, for crying out loud!

The maneuver--which we shall call the Gambit, from gam plus bit, as in shtick--was and is calculating in concept, precarious in execution, obscure in origin. (Who was the first? And why? Did Eve amble on a bramble in mid-smooch?)

A young lady--somehow she had to be young--standing and ordinarily fully clothed, would reach up to embrace her boyfriend, usually around the neighborhood of the shoulder or neck. As they kissed, one leg would rise until parallel with the ground or a little higher, depending upon the degree of devotion. The other, less comely, limb would maintain contact with the ground or reality, whichever came first.

Lip Bone to the Thigh Bone

Smack, slurp--and whoop went the leg. The lip bone connected to the thigh bone.

The leg in question, of course, was the more shapely of the pair. Studies were made, generally in front of the mirror. Like fingerprints, no two legs, even those employed by the same owner, are alike. You could look it up.

“We were taught to do it,” Debbie Reynolds said from Reno, where she was headlining her own show.

“It was a pose, to show off the leg, I would guess.

“Or maybe it was supposed to mean you got so excited one of your legs went numb.”

Reynolds, of course, was one of the prime perpetrators of the Gambit--young, cute as a bug’s ear, vivacious and the proud progenitor of one of the world’s best pair of pins, then as now.

“Sure,” she said, “a certain type would do it and a certain type wouldn’t. The ‘cute’ ones would do it, the ones who wore Peter Pan collars and bangs. The others would do things much more sexy, at least for that era.

“Remember, too, it was pin-up time, Varga time, and you had to have the legs to pull it off. Betty Grable, naturally, and all the dancers--dancers have good legs. Heck, even Joan Crawford did it--before she forgot how to dance.

“I don’t think it was a natural motion. It was just something a girl learned to do--probably from the movies--when she was 16 or 17.”

Did Reynolds do it when she was 16 or 17?

“Me? Hey, I never kissed when I was 16 or 17. I was raised a Nazarene. No matter what, your feet stayed firmly on the floor.”

Most influenced by the Gambit, rampant in movies and mags from the early ‘40s to the mid-’50s, were American women who are now of uncertain age--i.e. uncertain, at least for publication, as to whether they are closer to 40 or 60.

Whatever, they all admit to having done it--those with at least passable legs, that is--and reflecting on their semi-savory pasts, they confess that they were basically emulating their celluloid counterparts.

“Railroad stations,” said Betty, 40-60. “That’s what I associate with the Gambit. Railroad stations or some other place where you’d be meeting your guy or seeing him off. I mean, you wouldn’t be doing such a damn-fool thing if nobody was around to see it.”

(A reporter, 40-60, concurs, remembering with moronic affection the regular Saturday milk run, Smith-Holyoke to Dartmouth. For 15 quasi-lustful minutes, the platform would resemble a forum of flamingos in bobby sox. It made the blood bubble. It really did.)

“Oh, and there was one other circumstance, too,” added Betty: “When your parents were watching you kiss a guy. Up went the leg, zingo, so the kiss wouldn’t look too serious.”

Linda, 40-60: “It looked so good in the movies; so--I don’t know-- romantic. I did it because I thought it would make the kiss better. It never did, really, but I kept doing it, hoping it would put a little zip into the smooch. All it put was runs in my stockings. Still, it seemed sophisticated somehow.”

Elizabeth, 40-60: “Didn’t it have something to do with being short? I’m only just 5 feet, and I think I did it just to get up there. But I suppose I might just as easily have raised myself on tiptoes. Both tiptoes. The Gambit put you off balance. Then again, so does love. . . .

“Anyway, it just seemed like the thing to do, like crooking your little finger when you drank tea.”

Jan, 40-60: “ I never did it, but my mother told me about it.

“Seriously, though, it was such a feminine thing to do, or so we thought. I think the appeal was a peculiar but heady blend of innocence and savoir-faire. Of course, the guys who kissed me had their eyes closed--sometimes for the entire date, but that’s another story.

“I still do it, or so my man friend tells me. I think it’s when I’m putting my heart into something. Nowadays, it’s usually opening a bottle of ketchup.”

“Let’s face it,” said Gloria DeHaven by phone from New York, “it was an affectation--feminine, but affected.

“They posed us that way, mostly for the movie mags. It pulled muscles, arched the leg, made the calf look better. The whole look was great for the body. Like you bent one leg in when the camera was head-on.

“What we wore for the magazine photos, if you can believe it, were blouse tops, high heels and shorts. Today, I suppose, you’d be bare.

“I remember being asked by the studio to do a layout. We spent the whole day on a farm! Ava Gardner was there, and Donna Reed, I think. There we were, giving this come-hither look to a calf or a pig, with one shapely leg up in the air. Oink! It was hysterical!

“You got the best effect when the man was tall and the girl had to reach up. No, I don’t think it would’ve worked very well with Joyce Grenfell and Alan Ladd. . . . “I did it in films, I’m pretty sure, but less so than, say, June (Allyson). She was ‘cute.’ I was the ‘tease.’ There was a difference. Thank heaven I’ve matured.

“Still, you’re right. A certain type would, a certain type wouldn’t.”

Just for kicks, The Times bounced a short list of “woulds” and “wouldn’ts” off DeHaven. Whatever it was or wasn’t, that je ne sais quoi , DeHaven and Times were 100% in sync:

Terry Moore? “Yes.” (And still does, God love her.)

Cleo Moore? “Who’s Cleo Moore?”

Yvonne de Carlo? “No.”

Mitzi Gaynor? “Oh yes!”

Ella Raines? “Never. Nor Claude.”

Piper Laurie? “Undoubtedly.”

Agnes Moorhead? “You’re kidding.”

The possibilities are intriguing, if inconclusive. (Any number can play: Send us your short list.)

Definites would have to be Doris Day, Diana Lynn, Ginger Rogers, Jeanne Crain, the early Judy Garland, Priscilla Lane, Janet Blair, anybody playing opposite Van Johnson or Tab Hunter.

Definitely not would be Jane Russell, Thelma Ritter, Audrey Totter, Lauren Bacall, Carole Landis, Jessie Royce Landis, Vera Hruba Ralston, Dina Merrill, anybody named Redgrave.

Betsy Palmer would have done it but not Lilli. Audrey Hepburn but not Katharine. Nobody named Silvana, Marlene or Patience would have hoisted more than a toe.

Do they still do it? Occasionally, but either as a gag or a mnemonic device.

In a recent rerun of “Happy Days,” Ralph Malph (Donnie Most) looked on with longing as a chick did the Gambit on The Fonz--who else?--then nudged a buddy knowingly in the ribs. “When she kisses and her leg goes up,” he confided, “that means she’s worldly.”

Jessica Tate (the ineffable Katherine Helmond) did it below stairs with her husband in “Soap”--but only after being told there was a rat in the cellar. (A rat named Norman.)

Commercials use the Gambit to evoke nostalgia (girl kisses boy on small-town front porch for Big Red gum; girl kisses boy at railroad station--ah, there!--for Hanes stockings).

Once in a while there is a true aberration--Faye Dunaway (Faye Dunaway ?!) does it to William Holden in “Network,” shocking millions of American men--and now and then it’s done on the Carson show (Savannah Smith, Joan Rivers), but probably in deference to the host’s age.

Whatever the initial impetus, the Gambit remains quintessentially feminine--which is why, of course, the male cast of “La Cage aux Folles” revels in the ploy.

It was a little bit of business written into the musical by canny director Arthur Laurents, who knows a yock when it bites him on the thigh.

“It used to be considered very feminine, very dependent ,” Laurents said by phone.

“Besides making the leg look beautiful, it was sort of flirtatious. And as I say, dependent: You can’t stand on one leg without leaning--leaning into the kissee.

“It’s one of those things only women do, I think. It’s like when they say, ‘Let’s have lunch,’ and then they kiss both cheeks. Of course, they never connect. . . .”

The Gambit, then, remains one of the major unsolved mysteries of our time, leaving unanswered any number of questions as to why, when, who.

Do you suppose Martha Raye ever did it?

Do you suppose Elizabeth Taylor still can?

Can you do it while chewing gum?

Would anyone have dared to do it with Humphrey Bogart?

For that matter, whatever happened to the railroad station?